Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (30 page)

“So that is the whole story. I have just been forced to do so much and travel so much until for months I could never be really composed. Happily, honest men associated with me have learned enough about it to relieve me of lots of this and we have things more ordered than ever before, and it looks like we will have to take fewer chances any more, all tho' I am still on the run…

“Now I hope you can forgive me and not fine me. I am not able to pay any fines. I certainly have enough troubles without being fined; but if you must, make it as light as possible, and as soon as we have a print here on
Birthright
will send it for examination.”

Having placated the Virginia board, or so he hoped, Micheaux pressed his luck, asking a favor. “Also try to give us a license to exhibit
A Son of Satan,
” the current picture he was trying to peddle to Virginia theaters. “We have only eight houses in all the State of Virginia to get a little money out of and we need it.”

His trickster act both succeeded and failed. Though Virginia's chief censor was thoroughly vexed by Micheaux's “somewhat pathetic story” which “fails to excite commendation,” he decided that a modest twenty-five-dollar fine would be adequate to teach the man a lesson. (The fine was more “a sort of sop to conscience” than the actual punishment warranted, in the censor's words.)

The fine was bearable, and in the bargain Micheaux had convinced the censors that the race-picture market was too small to bother about. In a memorandum privately circulated among the board, the chairman reassured his fellow censors that Micheaux's race-picture company “at best can hope for but small gleanings from the State of Virginia. Its output goes only to negro theatres, of which there are less than a dozen in the commonwealth, and these houses, owing to their small patronage, can afford to pay only small sums for the pictures they lease.”

And he had sneaked
Birthright,
a film that broached provocative racial subject matter, into Virginia theaters, at least a handful of times. How
ever, according to scholar Charlene Regester, who has written extensively about Micheaux's tangles with censorship, it is far from certain whether
Birthright
was ever resubmitted or rereleased in the state. Despite the critical acclaim and audience popularity it garnered, Micheaux's adaptation of T. S. Stribling's novel saw an initially spotty release. Still—unlike
Deceit,
which vanished entirely—
Birthright
was a winner for Micheaux that would pay him back gradually over the years to come.

 

A Son of Satan,
Micheaux's quasi-comedy about a haunted house taken over by a Ku Klux Klan-type organization, never had a Broadway premiere, as Micheaux once hoped. But it did have a special preview for New York's censorship board in 1924. The New York censors obliged by ordering cuts; and so did censors in Chicago, Kansas, and elsewhere.

As always, Micheaux created different versions of his films for different markets. But in some areas, no manipulation could save such a tale—which featured a hooded group of racists led by a deranged mulatto, his criminality inherited from white forebears; a white orchestra playing black jazz for “intermingling” dancers (“which would prove offensive to Southern ideas,” in the disapproving words of the Virginia censorship board); and, above all, a culminating race riot.

A Son of Satan
was promptly banned by Micheaux's nemeses at the Virginia board. Regardless, in the first week of November 1924, Micheaux's haunted-house picture circulated in the state—advertised, for example, at the Attucks Theater in Norfolk. The state censors sent a telegram to stop the film, followed by “a detail of policemen” who seized the print and turned away “scores of theatergoers” on the opening night of a three-day engagement. No matter that the
Norfolk Journal and Guide,
a black newspaper, called
A Son of Satan
“as wholesome and entertaining, if not more so, than
The Birth of a Nation
or
The Klansman,
which have shown here [in Norfolk] many times.”

Wholesome it probably wasn't, but even D. Ireland Thomas had to agree it was mightily entertaining. Entertaining
and,
once again, courageous. Even intermittent detractors like Thomas had to admire Micheaux's persistent willingness to take on explicit race realities. No other filmmaker even came close.

“Some may not like this production because it shows up some of our
Race in their true colors,” Thomas wrote of
A Son of Satan
in his column. “They might also protest against the language used. I would not endorse this particular part of the film myself, but I must admit that it is true to nature, yes, I guess, too true. We've got to hand it to Oscar Micheaux when it comes to giving us the real stuff. This is all the criticism that I could find and I am a hard critic when it comes to Race pictures, and like Sylvester Russell, I do not want to see my Race in saloons or at crap tables. But it is not what we want, that gets the money, it is what the public clamors for…”

As usual, it was a struggle to push the picture past censors and find theaters. But where it could be shown, the public did clamor for
A Son of Satan,
one of the most intriguing of Micheaux's “lost” works.

 

The final polish of
The House Behind the Cedars
seemed to take forever. Micheaux kept postponing its completion, sandwiching other projects in front of the Chesnutt adaptation.

Traveling extensively with the prints of
Deceit, Birthright,
and
A Son of Satan,
dealing with publicity, bookings, and censorship, Micheaux used his spare time to think and write. As he'd done since his very first film, he also found time to shoot second-unit scenery for the scenario-in-progress he was carrying under his arm. During his swing through the South, he photographed the streets and skyline of Atlanta (“Under the Viaduct on Decatur Street,” read one very specific subtitle), and while in North Carolina he filmed cotton-pickers in the fields.

His next script was
Body and Soul,
and its star would be Paul Robeson.

Robeson already loomed as a colossus in American culture. He had played left end on the Rutgers football team, been a two-time All-American (1917 and 1918), and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. He went through Columbia Law School with honors before detouring into show business, becoming a formidable actor and eloquent singer. A lead actor in important Eugene O'Neill plays and other shows, he was also widely praised as one of the finest interpreters of Negro spirituals. He was singing on the New York and London stages as early as 1925. And yet somehow Hollywood had no use for Robeson until the early 1930s. It was Oscar Micheaux who propelled him onto the silver screen.

In
Body and Soul,
Micheaux had a script tailored to Robeson's giant
talent, one that called for an exceptional actor to play identical twins with polar opposite natures. One twin is a hardworking conscientious fellow, like the role models in other Micheaux films. But the main focus of the story is his brother, who masquerades as a minister of the gospel while in reality he is evil personified, a scoundrel who lies, steals, seduces, and murders to achieve his rotten ends.

Where
Body and Soul
would give Robeson his first opportunity in film, for Micheaux it marked a different crossroads. In the past five years he had dashed off a series of fresh, searching, always entertaining (if not always financially successful) pictures—a major accomplishment for a man who had entered filmmaking on a whim. He had established himself as a creative powerhouse, repeatedly using his own life story as a jumping-off point to explore broader cultural concerns.

But when he looked to other interesting voices in his culture (as with Charles W. Chesnutt), he sometimes expropriated ideas without care for the legal niceties. And with
Body and Soul,
he would borrow so directly that some scholars, including the respected authority Charles Musser, have called his script “imitative, derivative,” almost “plagiarizing.” By Musser's reckoning,
Body and Soul
poached freely from three plays by white playwrights—a kind of “makeshift trilogy” of dramas in which Robeson had starred, three plays that Micheaux had seen.

First and foremost, according to Musser, Micheaux's screenplay drew heavily from Nan Bagby Stephens's
Roseanne,
staged earlier in 1924, which featured Robeson as a corrupt preacher driven from his congregation. Micheaux blended ideas from
Roseanne
with aspects of two Eugene O'Neill plays in which Robeson had played leads:
The Emperor Jones,
about a former Pullman porter setting himself up as an emperor on a West Indies island (“a controversial work from the outset,” as Musser noted, in part because O'Neill too was prone to sprinkling his dialogue with the n-word); and
All God's Chillun Got Wings,
about the marriage of an ambitious Negro to a white woman, whose latent prejudice undermines his ambition to become a lawyer.

Micheaux's cabbaging of these sources was knowing and intentional, in Musser's view, “simultaneously a profound reworking and a critique of three plays ostensibly about Negro life and the Negro soul.”

This alleged “plagiarizing” should not overshadow that other side of Micheaux's borrowing: the “profound reworking” and “critique” that Musser also stressed. Corey K. Creekmur, another Micheaux expert, has
compared the filmmaker's expropriation of others' published or produced works (there would be later examples) to the “sampling” that is an accepted practice in contemporary hip-hop music. “As an African-American, whose predecessors could not own property because they were in fact legally owned property themselves,” Creekmur wrote astutely in
Oscar Micheaux & His Circle,
“Micheaux may have felt righteous justification in playing fast and loose with the ‘laws' of ‘copyright.'”

 

Paul Robeson had tentatively agreed to appear in the Micheaux project, but his contract demands couldn't be resolved until mid-October. This notation appears in the October 17, 1924, journal of Robeson's wife, Eslanda Goode Robeson: “Concluded arrangements with Oscar Micheaux for Paul's film. Made satisfactory contract for 3% gross income after the first $40,000 the picture brings in. Salary is $100 per week for 3 weeks.”
*

Early publicity releases floated the possibility of Evelyn Preer as the good-girl helplessly in the clutches of the duplicitous preacher, and that would have been dream-team casting. But Preer slipped away from Micheaux, and the last-minute substitute was one of his amateur unknowns, schoolteacher Julia Theresa Russell. The slender, fetching Russell was “one of the most beautiful colored women in New York,” according to the rare Micheaux–related item, trading on Robeson's cachet, that graced the front page of
Variety
on November 26, 1924.

The third lead was the versatile writer and actress Mercedes Gilbert as Russell's devout, churchgoing mother (who cannot believe that her favorite preacher is diabolical). The omnipresent Lawrence Chenault was also in the cast.

Micheaux poured himself into the unusual drama, which was filmed in New York during November 1924. Robeson was caught up in the intensity and excitement. The story was replete with church scenes, and the film's expensive highlight was another one of those vivid storm sequences that had become a Micheaux hallmark.

According to an entry in Mrs. Robeson's journal of November 4, 1924: “Michaux [sic] made storm scene out in Corona [N.Y.] today. What with the wind machine, fire hose, etc., it was the most realistic thing I ever saw.”

By Thanksgiving, they were done. Robeson went off to star in a limited Broadway run of
The Emperor Jones.
And Oscar Micheaux turned his attention to the premiere of
The House Behind the Cedars.

 

For once, serendipity lent a helping hand.

That fall, an East Coast divorce trial was making sensational headlines around the country. It was an especially “lurid case,” in the words of film scholar Charlene Regester, offering “a tantalizing microcosm of interracial relationships.”

In late October 1924, Leonard K. Rhinelander, the blue-blood scion of a socially prominent New York family, secretly married Alice Beatrice Jones, the daughter of a New Jersey cabdriver. The marriage wasn't made public for another month, and when it was, the press revealed that the bride's father was a West Indian native. Under pressure from his disapproving parents, Rhinelander left his West Indian bride and sued for annulment, charging his wife with deception for failing to inform him that she possessed “colored blood.”

The West Indian wife surprised everyone by fighting back, filing a suit for alimony. The result was a hotly contested trial that dominated the front pages of America's black press for weeks.

Ultimately, Rhinelander broke down in court, confessing that he had spent many hours with his bride's family, and the family never had concealed their racial identity. That was good enough, but adding to the titillation was a set of revelations from his love letters to his wife, confirming that the husband had engaged in “most unnatural relations” with Mrs. Rhinelander, to the extent that he could not possibly have mistaken her complexion.

The crowning moment came when the wife was persuaded to disrobe in court, to prove that “not even the proverbial blind man could mistake the color of her skin,” according to one account. The courtroom was cleared of spectators; then, hysterically weeping, and leaning on her
white-haired mother, Mrs. Rhinelander stripped to the waist and pulled her stockings down to her ankles. Judge and jury stared for a full ten minutes.

“Under her garments,” one reporter wrote, “she is much darker than her face, which, with the aid of cosmetics, has a sort of Spanish or Mexican shade. She is underneath what the sheiks and flappers call ‘high brown.'”